


brilliant years

by pianississimo



Category: L'Arc~en~Ciel
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Introspection, M/M, road head don't try this at home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:21:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 13,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27584681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pianississimo/pseuds/pianississimo
Summary: Exhibit A: “Don’t be an asshole. You, me, Tetsu, Ken—we’re all in this together. Don’t you fucking let us down like that.”Exhibit B: “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a pinball machine. I wish I could dissociate from that person, the one on the magazine cover, the one whose voice I hear on the radio in the taxi. I can’t even look in the mirror when I brush my teeth anymore.”Exhibit C: No words at all. Just wrapping my arms around his chest, covering his eyes with my hands, tugging him back into the swirl of crisp cotton sheets. Forget it all with me.—Some dreamy vignettes from the imaginary Sakuhai archives.
Relationships: Hyde/Sakura (L'Arc~en~Ciel)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 10





	1. premonition

**Author's Note:**

> A work of complete and utter fiction—I wanted to capture some of that vibe of shimmering nostalgia I’ve always gotten from L’Arc’s early music—that feeling of yearning for something that may not be real, but it’s so beautiful that you’ll believe in it anyway. And of course, Sakura and Hyde back in the day were honestly so iconic—mysterious, cute, flirty, careless, so unbelievably talented, more than a little bit tragic. Here's the version of them from my imagination.

_Sakura_

I was doing my own thing in Tokyo and had no intention of changing that. It was the end of December and I was playing drums on tour for another band I used to help. Then, these three guys I’d never heard of showed up at my live in Osaka. Their old drummer had abruptly departed and they wanted to recruit me. They took me out to dinner, and that was the beginning of it all.

One of them was tall, with a smiling face and an easy laugh.

The second was dressed like a textbook punk, but spoke like my salaryman uncle.

The third was a wisp of a boy with long, dark hair and the faraway eyes of a doe.

I made sure to give them my whole spiel about how I was tired of playing in bands.

“I’m an antisocial asshole, you know. Not that you need to hear it from me. Ask literally anyone I work with. They’ll tell you, yeah, that Sakura guy, he’s good when he shows up—if he shows up. I don’t like commitment. And I don’t like people. In this life, I just want to express myself in whatever way resonates with me in the moment. You’ll have a hell of a time getting me to fit in with your label’s grand plan or whatever. I just want to make the music I want to make. All the rest—girls, boys, money, fame, whatever—is noise.”

I probably went on for an hour like that, all serious, chain-smoking and downing cups of tea.

Then at some point, Ken, the smiling guitar player, started asking me about the people I was playing with and why I was tired of them, which turned into a conversation about my good old days as a roadie, and pretty soon I was telling less serious stories about going fishing and getting drunk with Crazy Cool Joe.

By that point, I had let my guard down enough to admit that I was hungry, so I started looking for my food.

“Where the hell’s my sweet-and-sour pork?”

Several rounds of dishes had come and gone. But there was no sweet-and-sour pork to be seen.

“Oh… shit,” said the wide-eyed singer, Hyde. He put his hand to his mouth. He had barely said anything out loud all night, though I had noticed him and the business-like bass player, Tetsu, talking to each other under their breath. How tiresome.

Hyde looked around the table and started laughing.

What the hell am I missing? I wondered.

“Oh my god, this is so embarrassing,” said Hyde, between giggles. “I must have eaten your food. It was an accident, I swear. I’m so sorry.”

We were seated at a little round table, Tetsu on my right, Ken on my left, Hyde opposite from me. I had half a mind to storm off and cause a scene. But watching Hyde’s uncontrollable peals of laughter, something softened in my heart. The way his narrow shoulders trembled, the way he was still clutching his hand to his mouth like he was worried his soul was going to fall out of his body.

I smiled across the table. “It’s okay.”

I waved down a passing server. “Another order of sweet-and-sour pork, please.” Then I fixed my eyes on Hyde. “Keep your hands off of this one.”

Hyde elbowed Tetsu in the ribs, his face shining with mirth. “Don’t worry, Tecchan will get the bill tonight,” he said. And winked at me.

Like I said, that was the beginning of it all.


	2. madness

_ Hyde _

Let’s just say Sakura and I didn’t get off to the best start. Honestly, I was scared of him at first. His flashing dark eyes, his x-ray vision stare. His way of speaking, in his clipped, confident voice, as if daring the world to challenge him.

The day after our dinner incident, we all went to a studio and jammed. His playing was all speed and shimmering colors, otherworldly in its lightness, instantly transforming the mood of even our improvisation. What was more, it wasn’t quite that he became a different person behind the drumset, but some more of the puzzle pieces of his personality came together. His intensity, unsettling in everyday situations, transformed into convincing passion. Organized chaos coalesced into music.

“This is it!” I wanted to shout. “We’ve found our person!” Given all that Sakura had said to us about being a lone wolf, I didn’t dare get my hopes up that he would actually accept our invitation to join the band. But lo and behold, just after the new year, he called Tetsu to say yes. Then the three of us from Osaka packed up our things and went to Tokyo to start recording.

I practically moved into a drafty alcove above the studio that was little more than a broom closet. Even though we had been playing these songs in lives for a while now, there was so much that didn’t hold up under closer scrutiny. Melodies that went nowhere. Lyrics that might as well have been lifted from a high school student’s poetry assignment done the night before it was due.

I filled up piles of scraps of papers with scribbles and question marks. Sleeping and eating became afterthoughts. Even when I finally arranged words and notes into phrases that I thought were half-okay, I doubted myself. As the days and nights rolled into one blurry sequence, my mind was like a gauzy scarf blowing in the wind.

Harried-looking men with long-ish hair and a vague air of self-importance flitted in and out of the studio. I couldn’t keep track of half of them, and yet everyone seemed to have different ideas about what we should do. Double-track the guitars here. Add a keyboard there. Less cymbals. Could this bassline be less busy? Hold this note longer. Sing this part cleaner.

At first, all of these characters armed with their opinions intimidated me. But as I spent more time cooped up in that alcove, my own conviction in my point of view solidified. Or I suppose  you could say that I succumbed to my worst navel-gazing tendencies. At any rate, deadlines were approaching, and everyone’s patience was wearing thin.

Our producer had been saying for a week that we should shorten the bridge of one song. I was totally against it, but I also didn’t know how to say no gracefully. So I hemmed and hawed whenever it came up, smiling vapidly, playing dumb and asking questions I already knew the answers to.

On that particular day, however, he was more insistent than usual. “Nothing is happening here,” he said. “You’re just muttering random phrases and killing the flow of the song.”

He ran his hands through his mop of hair and frowned at me. “You know, you can’t just arbitrarily decide on the way you think things should be, and then refuse to budge without a reason when people who know more than you give you advice.”

Maybe I would have kept my temper under control if I had been sleeping more or better, but somehow this was the last straw.

“We can’t change it,” I said sharply. I heard the petulance in my voice, but couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out all at once. “The bridge is a break from what came before it. It’s supposed to symbolize a descent into madness. It needs to be unnerving and strange. It really needs to stay this way!”

The producer opened his mouth and then closed it again. His face was slowly turning red. Even Ken stopped absent-mindedly strumming his guitar to stare at me.

“Give him a break.” A calm voice broke the silence. Sakura had been so quiet that I had almost forgotten he was in the room. “It’s Hyde’s song, after all. If he feels strongly about it, we should work with that.”

The producer looked at Sakura for a long second. “Well. Make it better then,” he said abruptly, pulling himself out of the chair and lurching towards the door.

After the door slammed, Tetsu let out a low whistle. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” he said.

Ken laughed. Sakura just looked at me with his brow furrowed. “Yeah, I’ve actually got some ideas for how we can make it better…” he muttered under his breath to no one in particular.

Later, I was shuttered up in the alcove again, alone with my thoughts, when the door creaked open. Sakura’s face appeared, his thick mane of black hair pushed back.

“I’m going to get some coffee. Do you want anything?”

“A coffee would be great,” I said.

Sakura stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “You know, you shouldn’t be so hesitant to voice your opinions,” he said. “It’s not good to bottle it all up like that.”

“Yeah, that was a bit of a meltdown back there.”

“I’m not joking. You have good ideas. And I like your way of expressing them. So you should be more confident when you’re talking to these people. They might be older than us, but it’s your music. Your feelings are more important than theirs.”

I could feel myself blushing, which only made it worse. Was Sakura really going out of his way to be nice to me? “He’s right though. I’m just making it up as I go along, you know, when it comes to singing, and everything to do with music, really. Sometimes I worry that it’s too obvious,” I waved at the mess of papers on the table, overflowing onto the windowsill.

“Well, that’s honestly what everyone does,” Sakura said dismissively, crossing his arms. He stepped closer to me, looking down at my scribblings. “How do you come up with all of this stuff anyway?”

“I don’t really have a process or anything,” I said, twisting my mouth into a grimace. “I’m like a mole digging around in the dirt. I just write stuff down until I come up with something that seems… true, maybe?”

“Hmmm.” Sakura nodded slightly and moved over to my side of the table. I could feel the heat emanating from his torso, inches away from my face, taut under his black tank top, even though it was the dead of winter.

“So then... how do you come up with your part?” I asked, feeling very put on the spot.

“I listen to the song a bunch of times. Then I map out the structure,” he said, pulling a small notebook from his pocket and showing me pages of neat diagrams, filled with numbers and geometric shapes.

“I write out different rhythms that might fit with each section,” he continued. “And then I keep playing through until I find the patterns that work the best.”

“Ah… so methodical.” I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

He shrugged nonchalantly. “Maybe. Obviously, it's important to practice and prepare and all that. And experience helps too. But when it actually matters, it all comes down to instinct and what feels right in the moment. And, like you said, finding the truth.”

I wondered if the intensity of his gaze was enough to radiate measurable energy. Like the sun.

“Anyway, I’ll see you later,” he said, and slipped out the door so quickly and quietly I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing.

I tried to write some more but couldn’t focus, so I went out for a smoke. When I came back, there was a coffee and a donut waiting for me on the table.

I smiled for what felt like the first time in a while.


	3. fate

_ Sakura _

After we finished recording in Tokyo, I came back to Osaka in March with the other three with a bag full of black clothes and a guitar.

The next month passed in a flurry of preparations for the first tour. It was a good thing we were busy, because I hated every idle moment I spent in Osaka. I gave up my freedom, my home, for what? Too many meetings and lugging a drum kit around to different rehearsal studios every other day? The band, though—that was the problem. There was a part of me that resented them for being compelling enough that I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I just fucked off as usual.

Then, it was time to pile into a van with our manager and set off around the country. I expected to be claustrophobic and miserable, and I wasn’t entirely wrong. But after getting used to the chaos of being on the road again, I had to admit that I was having fun too. Everyone’s wide-eyed excitement must have rubbed off on me against my will.

Regardless of the venue or the crowd, the atmosphere was explosive every night. I had played with plenty of guys who could shred like nobody’s business and prance around the stage with all the confidence in the world. But I had never experienced this kind of chemistry before. Sure, technically speaking, we never quite nailed all of the details in those days, but it was impossible to care. Though the ingredients were straightforward—Tetsu’s melodic grooves, Ken’s passionate riffs, Hyde’s soaring incantations, my rhythms floating under and over them—the magic was more mysterious. It was as if whatever emotion I tried to express was amplified and purified by the others, transmuted into something elemental—a force, or a color.

I must have spent hours upon hours watching Hyde twirling around in his all-white getup, teasing the audience tirelessly, mercilessly, as I hit the drums from my platform behind him, my movements almost subconscious, lost in a kind of strange timeless high. Of course, with the usual arrangement for a four-piece band, I would always see the vocalist most directly. But Hyde just drew me to him like a magnet—he was so committed in his expressivity, and of course, I had to admit it—so easy on the eyes. With every flourish of his delicate arm, every flick of that high ponytail—was he following me, or the other way around, in this intimate lockstep before hundreds of hungry stares?

And every once in a while, he’d look back from his perch on the monitors, right back at me. Gone was the Hyde I thought I knew, with his gentle smile, his soft-spoken manner, prone to napping in the van with his limbs all curled up onto themselves like a housecat. In his place, an angelic apparition, with eyes radiating the resolve of the devil. An unnerving bride hellbent on destruction, seduction. Simply put, the most beautiful creature I had ever seen in my life.

It was one the last shows of the year. The stage was lower than most, and the crowd was rowdy and singing along to every word of every song. How did they already find the time to memorize them all? From my spot, it looked like Hyde was floating above a formless horde of crying fans, their arms reaching up towards him, grabbing onto his white tunic, his hair, his face, like the tentacles of a giant sea monster, and I had the crazy urge to launch myself across the stage. I would sacrifice myself to those greedy hands instead, even though I wasn’t the one they screamed for—stay away from him! He’s ours! He’s mine…?

And afterwards, once we packed everything up, we were walking back to the van, a faint ringing still lingering in my ears. Ken’s lanky figure and Tetsu’s straight-backed one were hazy silhouettes against the flickering lamps up ahead. Hyde was back in his street clothes, swaddled up in a humongous coat by my side, smiling that easy, unpretentious off-camera smile of his, chattering away about nothing, every word out of his mouth a drop of warm gold in the blue air. Dopamine and adrenaline and god only knows what else coursing through my veins, I threw my arm around his shoulders, nestling that pretty face into the crook of my neck. He let out a small sweet laugh, a precious gasp of surprise, and I let fly a wordless whoop out into that crystalline, star-drenched night.


	4. soul

_ Hyde _

We had been planning to stay in Osaka for longer. But the album took off, and when we finally returned home, fruit baskets and flowers and long, tearstained letters and chocolates and more outlandish and embarrassing gifts appeared on our doorsteps. Major labels sent executives in suits to wine and dine us. After combing through reams of fine print, Tetsu announced that as for our musical future in Osaka, the writing was on the wall. We would have to move to Tokyo eventually. Why not now? I didn’t have a good answer. So we signed the contracts, and the new chapter began.

I spent many evenings alone in my still-empty apartment, looking out at the lights outside twinkling on one by one, wondering whether my life was actually my own. The things that had happened recently—could they really have happened to me? Then I would think: better not question it too much, lest I wake up from the dream, only to find myself back in my hometown, perspiring in the afternoon heat, the clicks of mahjong tiles and the distant sound of a jukebox drifting through the open window of my childhood bedroom.

No—let me stay here. Though sometimes, it felt like I was standing at the mouth of a great river, everything beyond my fingertips bathed in translucent mist. A voice telling me to dive in and surrender myself to the crushing flow. The force drawing me inexorably to the water—faith, or delusion?

It was a Friday with whispers of spring in the air. We were in the midst of recording again, this time in cushier studios, better insulated against sound and cold, equipped with working coffee machines. After a week where it felt like songs were finally taking shape, we all went out for a late dinner.

“I’m so glad it’s the weekend,” I exhaled, sinking down in the hard-backed wooden chair. A steady trickle of office workers continued past the restaurant window.

“There’s still plenty left to do, though,” Tetsu said. The circles under his eyes looked more pronounced than usual. He rubbed his shoulder gingerly.

“How many times do I need to tell you?” said Ken. “You need to take a break. Relax! Take a day off! Poor Tecchan, do you want a massage?” Ken reached over to grab Tetsu’s shoulder.

“Enough, enough, get off me,” said Tetsu, breaking into a reluctant smile and swatting Ken’s hand away.

“Actually, come to think of it, do you want to go shopping with me tomorrow? I need to get some furniture,” said Ken. 

“About time, huh? Going to start having people over to your place?” said Sakura, smirking.

“Oh yeah. Parties! Girls! Sakura, you want in? Maybe you can invite your classmates! Or your friends!” said Ken, a hopeful look on his face.

“The only woman under the age of forty I keep in touch with around here is my sister, and she’s no fun at all,” Sakura drawled.

“Too bad. I guess I’ve got to start spending more time at the hostess clubs then,” Ken said with a pout.

Tetsu rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to waste my time taking you shopping if you’re just going to trash your place throwing shady parties.”

“Come on, I was joking about the hostess clubs. Like I said, who the hell would I invite over anyway? We don’t know anyone here!”

Sakura snorted. “Yeah, what kind of party would it be with just the four of us and our manager?”

“That’s my idea of torture,” Ken said seriously.

“Hyde, do you have any weekend plans? You’ve finished your lyrics early this time,” said Tetsu, turning to me.

“Hmmm. I haven’t really thought about it yet,” I said. Truthfully, it was a new feeling to be done with anything early. “Maybe I’ll go for a drive?”

“Yeah, we’re completely done with my song. Shouldn’t we celebrate?” Sakura chimed in.

I sat up straighter. “It was actually easier, in a way. Writing from someone else’s point of view.”

Especially Sakura’s, I thought. He was so decisive, so sure of his interests, and so secure in his self-presentation. Pretty much the opposite of myself, or at least how I saw myself, pulled in a million directions at once, half-surprised to even see my reflection in the mirror in the mornings.

The four of us were all close in those days. Maybe it was inevitable, after spending so much time together, playing cards in dressing rooms, leaving it all out there on stage every night—and looking back, everything was still simple. Tetsu and Ken became like the brothers I never had. But with Sakura, there was always a hint of intrigue layered on top. Sure, there was friendship. Of course, there was admiration. And on top of that? Something scarily close to fascination, just a little bit too dangerous to speak out loud. 

From Sakura’s off-hand comments and… well… flirting, I more or less gathered that the fact that both of us were men was rather inconsequential. But getting entangled with a band member was never a wise idea. Getting a foothold in the new scene in Tokyo was already complicated enough—surely the last thing we needed was an additional distraction. On the one hand, collaborating on Sakura’s song provided a concrete reason to spend time together in the name of “work.” But of course, after spending a couple of weeks huddled up in the studio with him, embarking on rambling conversations about the nature of reality and the ephemerality of our bodies, we only sank deeper into maddening ambiguity.

“Must have been interesting, picking Sakura’s brain,” said Tetsu, interrupting my reverie. He raised his meticulously plucked eyebrows.

“Uh oh, Hyde, you better not start spouting stuff about relativity and black holes, and the Archimedean solids ranked from best to worst, or whatever,” said Ken.

“Yeah, having one person talking that kind of nonsense around here is more than enough,” added Tetsu.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think I got any of Sakura’s smarts,” I said. “Just his healthy sense of distrust in reality.”

“That’s right,” Sakura said with a chuckle. “Better watch out.” His hand reached out under the table and landed on my knee.

The feeling of warmth slowly permeating through my jeans to my skin seemed to nudge all of my other thoughts out of my brain. Sakura’s expression was inscrutable, his dark eyes boring into my own. I bit my lip. Why did his teasing always feel like a challenge?

“Hey!” Tetsu said sharply, though there was a smile on his face. “Don’t you dare try anything funny with my precious Hyde here.”

Ken, watching our three-way staredown, rolled his eyes and let out a laugh. Mercifully, the arrival of our food at that moment spared me from having to come up with something to say.

After dinner, we followed Ken to a bar, where he promptly bumped into an acquaintance and disappeared off into the crowd. Tetsu, stifling a yawn, announced he was heading home early and bade us a good night.

“Looks like we won’t be seeing Ken again anytime soon,” I said, practically shouting over the house beat booming out over the crowd.

“He’s probably forgotten all about us by now,” said Sakura.

“Yeah, he was probably trying to lose us all along.”

“I bet he’s asking girls to go furniture shopping with him right this moment.”

I laughed. “Should we at least try to find him though?”

“Eh. He won’t be missing us,” said Sakura. He glanced haughtily at the meticulously dressed group at the next table over. “This crowd’s too fashionable anyway. Don’t you think it’s boring?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said with a shrug. “I just wish they’d turn down the music. It’s giving me a headache.” 

Sakura drained his whiskey in a single gulp. “Why don’t we find somewhere quieter to go?”

“What about Ken though? He might be worried if he comes back and we’re gone.”

“Come on. You worry too much. Ken’s not going to care. He’s going to have a great time without us.”

Sakura leaned over, his face inches away from mine. “We could go back to my place. Watch a movie or something,” he said.

A hundred butterflies took flight in my chest. Surely Sakura just meant... well, what did he mean? And what did I dare to hope? Breathe in, breathe out. I tried to arrange my face into an approximation of a neutral expression, feeling the phantom weight of his hand on my knee.

“Okay,” I heard myself saying. “Let’s go.”

A while later, we were sitting at Sakura’s kitchen table, smoking cigarettes with the window open. Neither of us brought up the movie again. His hair was getting longer, its loose strands being blown into his eyes by the restless breeze, and I fought off with difficulty the impulse to reach over and smooth them back.

“Right around this time of night, I used to sneak out of my house to bike around the city,” he said, looking out of the window.

“All by yourself? Brave of you,” I said.

“Yeah, my brother would be the last to finish his homework and go to bed. So I’d wait half an hour after I heard his door close. Then—freedom.”

“Where would you go? Wouldn’t people see you and tell you to go home?”

“Nah, everyone was too drunk to give a shit about some random kid on his bike. Sometimes I’d make it pretty far, out to Ikebukuro or Shibuya.”

“What?” I screwed up my face, trying to imagine a map of Tokyo in my head, as my heart thudded away in my ears. “That must have taken hours.”

“It was always worth it, though. All the skyscrapers and construction sites at night. Like something out of Blade Runner.”

“That sounds spooky.”

“You would’ve liked it.” 

“Yeah, I’m sure I would’ve,” I said. “My friends and I used to ride our bikes into the hills nearby at night. Sometimes we’d stay out in the woods until morning.”

Sakura reclined in his chair, resting his forearm on one knee drawn up to his chest. Even in this pose, his lean limbs looked like coiled springs, reminding me of a lounging jaguar. “Isn’t that much scarier? Who knows what could be hiding in the woods?” he said.

“Just runaway cats and the like,” I said. “All of the worst accidents I ever got into always happened during the day.”

He tilted his head, a smile dancing on the corners of his lips. “It’s pretty hard to imagine you, sneaking around in the woods at night and crashing your bike and stuff like that.”

“What are you getting at, huh?” I raised my eyebrows in mock indignation.

Sakura just smiled, dark eyes glittering, and pushed his raven-black hair out of his face. “You know, I figured you must be tired of hearing stuff like this. But I really did think you were a woman for a second when I first met you.”

“So how did you feel when you realized I’m not? Disappointed?” He was right. Of course, I’d heard that line a dozen times before, usually from men in denial about themselves to themselves, or else desperately trying to cover up their misreading of me, and it brought me nothing but irritation. But it sounded different from Sakura’s lips, maybe because it seemed like he had been waiting to get it off his chest for a while, and maybe because I cared far too much about what he would say next.

“No. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t disappointed.” He looked down, like he was waiting for words to be spelled out by the grain of the wood. “It doesn’t matter to me. Not one bit.” His Adam’s apple floated down his throat as he swallowed, and I thought of a stone statue sprung to life. “I’m not one bit less fascinated by you.”

His eyes met mine again, with a questioning, vulnerable look I had never seen before, as if a veil had been lifted from their usually bottomless depths. “And you? I’ve been wondering, lately, if you...” I realized I was a bit lightheaded. It felt like his voice was reaching me from a great distance, and simultaneously, like his face was falling towards mine across the table...

What happened next? It was impossible to say for sure who moved first. Perhaps it was as if we were two halves of a whole, existing across an invisible mirror for an instant. Like Narcissus and his image in the water. Sakura’s lips suddenly pressed onto mine. My lips suddenly pressed onto Sakura’s. Sakura’s hand at the nape of my neck. My hand at the nape of Sakura’s neck.

In one fluid motion, Sakura pulled me into his lap. I tasted tobacco and salt, smelled soap and something like the earth after a storm. His tongue was a flickering flame between my lips, and I wished for time to stop, as his fingertips outlined mysterious patterns on my cheek, the skin behind my ear, the hollow below my shoulder blades, the length of my spine. I shuddered, though not from the cold breeze. Surely every bit of me would burn up at any second now.

“Hey,” he breathed.

“Hmm?” I tugged my sweater, already half off, over my head and tossed it onto the other chair.

“You okay?”

“Okay?” I repeated, barely comprehending. How was he still being so… thoughtful? Just kiss me until my breath is yours. Hold me until I’ve forgotten this name that I’ve chosen for myself. “More than okay.” I traced my thumb along the harsh line of his jaw. “Better than my wildest dreams.”

Then he lifted me into his wiry arms, like I was a sack of feathers—I laughed, I might have shrieked—and then we were in the bedroom, the glare from the streetlights spilling onto the sheets, and then onto garments shed with fumbling haste.

Even then, as our limbs folded into unfamiliar tangles, some small corner of my mind kept looping back to the memory of the first time we played with Sakura in that rehearsal studio in Osaka. I thought of all the ways of knowing someone that come only with making music, and all the other ways that come only with going to bed. How lucky was I, then? More pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was Sakura—I would collect them, holding these the closest to my chest. The preciousness of it all was enough to make my breath catch in my throat—or was that the rasp of his whisper in my ear, or his fingers lightly tracing their way up my thigh, and then touching, stroking, so gently and then so insistently that my eyes threatened to roll back in my head and I thought, over and over again, am I dreaming, am I dreaming?

His body was a starkly new landscape, all gulleys and crags, smooth skin and solid sinew, that I sunk my eyes, my nails, my mouth into like a raving mad sculptor: so this is what my art school days were preparing me for? I knew that Sakura had a thoughtfulness and tenderness to him under the tough guy exterior but I wasn’t prepared for how carefully, reverentially he moved his hands over me, so much so that I began to wonder if he was doubting himself or regretting something? I pushed this thought away just as he leaned over to turn on the bedside lamp and rummage through the nightstand drawer, a faintly apologetic look on his face, shielding the light with the back of his hand, and I thought, surely—he knew what he was doing all along.

As he moved to turn off the switch, I caught his hand with my own. “Leave it.”

He turned to me, surprise etched into those regal, aquiline features, his dark eyes overflowing with a hunger that made something in my chest ache.

“I want to see you,” I said.

And after that, surely, there were more details, but I only knew for sure that my fragmented observations didn’t come close to adding up to the indivisible truth slipping away in the dark. Then the hot, blinding sear of pleasure took me, and though I had yearned for it, pleaded for it, up until that moment, once it passed, I had a feeling not unlike having a bucket of cold water thrown over me, as I remembered whose bed I was in, and what was all mixed up hopelessly over both of our bodies, and I looked over at Sakura. His face wore an expression of incredulity that must have been the same as my own until he cast his eyes down and smiled, and we both laughed, awkwardly at first, and then freely, and I laid my head on his chest, felt it slowly rising and falling, and thought, ah, so this is how the world changes—all at once.


	5. the moon, the sea, the pain

_ Sakura _

It was some indeterminate time of night when I finally pulled up to Hyde’s place. Still early enough that I wasn’t going to go break down his door, but late enough that—well, I should know better by now than to expect him to be prompt.

We had the following day completely off—a rarity. Our schedules had become beyond hectic, filled not only with recording, but also with interviews, photoshoots, filming, and TV appearances. Although such appointments were supposedly the markers of success, and people I barely knew kept on coming up to me backstage and congratulating me, I was getting tired of having to answer the same question twenty times, as if it meant anything at all in the first place. Couldn’t these listeners of ours just think for themselves? 

A rap on the window interrupted my brooding. Hyde, pale as a ghost in the night, wearing a sheepish smile, swung open the door and slid into the passenger seat, dropping a kiss on my cheek. “Good evening, Yacchan.”

I nodded and started the car, almost surprised by the engine rumbling to life in the stillness. Soon, we were gliding out of the city into the suburbs and into the quiet green hills.

“This is nice,” said Hyde, his voice barely audible over the hum of the road beneath the tires and the whistling of the wind through the open windows.

“It’s peaceful, isn’t it? Makes you feel like you can forget about all the bullshit for a little while.”

“Mmmm.”

A couple of other cars passed us going the opposite way, their headlights rudely blaring out of the darkness.

“Don’t you ever wonder,” said Hyde, “what the people in those other cars are doing? Especially so late. Where are they going?”

I let out a short laugh that sounded like a bark. “Probably cheating on their wives or something.”

“Oh come on.” He punched me lightly on the arm. “Don’t be so cynical about these things.”

“Okay. Well, maybe they’re just doing the same as us. Going for an aimless drive in the middle of the night. Enjoying the quiet of the road. Getting away from the everyday grind.”

“Ah, yeah.” Hyde hesitated. “I’m tired, too.” His tone brightened, and I could practically hear the smile in his voice. “What’s that saying again? ‘Sometimes the journey is the destination,’ right?”

“So they say,” I said, the corners of my mouth curving upwards in spite of myself.

I glanced over for a moment. His seat was reclined all the way back, his boots up on the dashboard. There was no way in hell I would let anyone else get away with that. He had cut his hair so that it fell just below his shoulders, still long enough to tickle my face when he leaned his head back and the breeze was blowing just right.

“So how shall we enjoy our journey tonight, then?” he said.

“Do you want to listen to anything?” I waved at the glove compartment.

Hyde unlatched it and slowly thumbed through the CDs. “Ooh. Have you listened to this yet?” He held up the new Radiohead album.

“Yeah.”

“Is it any good?”

“Yeah. Want to put it on?”

“Maybe later.”

“Hmph. Suit yourself.”

“I will.” He smiled, a hint of mischief on his delicate features. “The road’s deserted now, isn’t it?”

“Looks like we’re the only desperate bastards out here.”

“Well, I’ve got an idea...” His hand landed lightly on my shoulder. Slowly crept down my chest until it stopped on my thigh.

I stared straight ahead, trying to keep my voice—and my hand on the wheel—as steady as possible. “And I’m an open-minded man.”

“And a good driver, aren’t you?” His fingers crept down to my belt buckle, and I heard the click of metal on metal, felt the loosening of fabric.

“Hell of a lot better than you.”

He laughed softly. Paused to tie back his hair.

“Good. Now keep your eyes on the damn road.” His breath was hot. Irresistible.

I did as I was told.

  
  
  


_ You can force it but it will not come. _

The impassive asphalt before us continued to unfurl like a snake into the velvet dark.

_ You can taste it but it will not form. _

Hyde’s breathless sigh, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, hair all askance again, huge eyes shining under the silver moon.

_ Everything is broken. Everyone is broken. _

And yet…

  
  
  


“You know, if I’d lost it back there, it really wouldn’t have been a bad way to go,” I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, after we turned around to head back towards the city.

Hyde winced, his arched brows knitting together in a frown. “Are you kidding? Tetsu would have killed us.”

“Not if we’re already dead.” I almost wanted to laugh as I said it, wanted to pinch myself, needed to swallow the giddiness before it bubbled out of my throat. Out of all the absurd things that I had gotten myself into after meeting Hyde, this had to have been near the top of the list.

“He’d still find a way to make us regret it.”

“Well, you’re welcome for not crashing the car.”

“What a talent.” He reached over to take my hand. 

“So you’re saying you don’t want to die with my dick in your mouth? I’m honestly offended," I grumbled with what I was sure was a shit-eating grin. Just couldn't help it at this point.

“Nah. I want to be a retired old man, living in Hawaii, floating in the pool on one of those inflatable rafts with a drink in my hand. All my grandkids would be running around in the backyard. Then they’d hear a giant splash—‘oh no, Grandpa’s fallen into the pool!’—and a great big tropical bird, startled awake, would fly out of a tree into the sky.”

I snorted. “Wow. You’ve got some imagination, as usual.”

“Hey. It could happen.”

“Grandpa Hyde… huh.” I looked at him. He looked out the window, his face turned slightly away from me, his chin tilted slightly up, the pale, smooth skin of his neck exposed—utterly vulnerable, yet I knew that truly I was the one who was at his mercy. “You’ve actually thought about this before, haven’t you?”

“Of course I have. I mean, not in a really serious way or anything. But it’s normal to daydream about things like that, isn’t it?”

“You know, I keep learning that your mind is really a lot more twisted than I would’ve thought.”

Hyde laughed. “You’re one to talk.”

“There’s a difference,” I replied. “You’ll live in constant anticipation of that moment when death comes for you. Whereas I’d like to live like he won’t ever find me at all.” 

“Hmm. You’re not wrong.” He fell silent for a long moment, squaring his chin as if steeling himself against something, gazing at the road beyond the windshield, his eyes half-closed in contemplation.

“We really make quite a pair,” I said, wondering if I had been a bit too unkind, again. He only leaned in closer and nodded serenely.

Fuck me, I thought. Is there anything— _ anything _ in this sad, mortal world—I wouldn’t do for that smile? Shouldn't I be more generous, more kind, find it in my heart to just be good, for that smile?

“Indulge me for a minute here,” he said finally, lightly. “Imagine: you live exactly how you want to for the next fifty years. How is it going to end?”

“Well. How about this. I’ll be playing daytime gigs at the local jazz bar with a bunch of other old guys. There’ll be like three people in the audience, and two of them are still drunk from the night before. We’ll finish playing Giant Steps, and I’ll be doing a solo to close it out, all hunched over, hitting the cymbals like crazy”—I banged noisily on the steering wheel—“and that’ll be the last thing I know,” I finished, jerking my head to the side dramatically.

“Ooh, how fun. I’d come to your shows.”

“Yeah right. Spare yourself.”

“Sakura,” he said, and I could taste each syllable as it fell from his lips as if I’d never heard them before. “I’ll cherish you forever.” He laced his cool fingers with mine with impossible delicacy. His lips brushed my cheek lightly, and I imagined a feather glancing off of my face on its wayward trajectory from the sky.

“Stop it.” I laughed. His hand squeezed my own, so gently it could have broken my heart into a million pieces.

Even though the number of kilometers left until Tokyo was steadily ticking down with each sign we whizzed past, even though I would still have to face the million things on my plate by the time the sun would come to shine over these hills tomorrow, I felt calmer, as if the moon with her cool face had impressed herself upon my chest, as if the right way forward was illuminated by a light I had remembered how to see again.


	6. fall

_ Hyde _

I woke up to banging noises and raised voices outside my room. I looked around in a daze—the other side of the bed was empty. I jammed my feet into my slippers and stumbled to the door, opening it to see Tetsu, fully dressed, arms crossed, cursing under his breath, standing in the corridor with a couple of our staff, a videographer I vaguely remembered from the day before, and the hotel manager, who looked nervous. The door across the hall was flung open to a seemingly deserted room, the bed neatly made—Sakura’s room.

“What’s going on? Is everything okay?” I asked, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

“He went out for a smoke an hour ago,” Tetsu said, gesturing at the videographer, “and thought he saw Sakura’s car pulling out of the lot. He mentioned it to the staff in the lobby, and they came to ask me about it. I thought it must have been a misunderstanding, but it looks like he’s really gone.”

I put my fingers to my throbbing temple. “Maybe there was some kind of emergency that came up,” I offered. I racked my brain—did Sakura say anything strange yesterday? We came back to my room after dinner, and I must have fallen asleep before him—suddenly remembering the state we had left everything in, I hastily closed the door behind me.

Tetsu sighed, blowing his long red bangs out of his eyes. “Perhaps, but why didn’t he at least leave a note or a message then?”

“Hmm. Maybe he misunderstood something about the schedule…” As the words left my lips, I could hear Sakura’s voice from last night, complaining that we hadn’t finished filming yesterday. So he must have left with intention, then—but what intention exactly?

“How could that be?” Tetsu sounded more exasperated now. “You don’t need to bother, Hyde. He doesn’t deserve your defense.”

“Sorry to bother you with this,” said the videographer, sounding very apologetic indeed. “I spoke with the director, and there’s not much left to do today. It will be enough to just get a few shots of the three of you, and then we’ll wrap it up.”

“Thank you for taking care of it,” Tetsu said stiffly.

I nodded, suddenly feeling like a lead weight had dropped into my stomach. “I need to wash up. I’ll see you all downstairs in a bit.”

Some hours later, the three of us were standing on the beach with our feet in the cold water, the waves lapping at our ankles like obedient dogs. We were on a break while the crew checked the footage from the morning.

The wind was so gusty that it took more than a couple of tries to light my cigarette.

“Man, why would Sakura want to go back to the city when it’s so nice out here?” Ken asked, bending down to swipe his hand through the spray. His heavily made-up face, red lipstick and all, somehow made his expression look simultaneously serious and clownish.

“Beats me,” I said, kicking up seawater into a hundred glass beads glittering in the air.

“It’s just irresponsible,” said Tetsu darkly from behind his sunglasses, arms crossed tightly, knuckles white.

“You know how he is though,” said Ken, his voice light as he shot Tetsu a look. “I mean, he’s never made a secret out of how much he hates doing shoots and interviews, all that business-type stuff.”

“Does he think we’re having the time of our lives out here?” Tetsu retorted. “Dancing around like fools, pretending to play our instruments?”

“Well, it’s safe to say you hate it less than he does,” Ken pointed out. I stifled a laugh. Even if he didn’t want to admit it in the moment, Tetsu absolutely relished every aspect of promoting ourselves.

“You can’t say Sakura hasn’t been honest with us, though,” I said, taking a long drag on my cigarette. “Remember that first dinner we had with him? He was ranting forever about how much he hated superficial things.”

“Yeah, but things were simple back then,” Tetsu said, frowning. “I can understand having that attitude when you’re basically still an amateur. But we didn’t really imagine then that we’d actually get the opportunities we have now, you know?”

I caught Ken’s eye and we both smiled. We all knew that Tetsu had been imagining exactly our current situation for years.

“The stakes are totally different now,” Tetsu continued, staring down the horizon. “I mean, it’s really about being an adult and taking ownership of your actions.”

I imagined Sakura getting into his car alone at the break of dawn, speeding down the highway with the stereo blasting. Was he angry, or sad, or just resolute? Different arrangements of his features flashed through my mind like slot machine animations, his eyebrows knitting, then relaxing, his forehead wrinkling, unwrinkling, the corners of his mouth going up, down, up, down—

“Well, I just hope nothing’s wrong,” Ken said. He looked at me. “Did he say anything to you?”

“No. Everything seemed normal yesterday.”

“It’s not like this is the first time he’s missed out on work,” said Tetsu, sounding weary beyond his years in the end.

A bubble of frustration pressed up in my chest. Of course, it was just like Sakura to do whatever he felt like, to be so rash yet so unapologetic that it was impossible to stay angry with him. After all, what use was it to stand up against something like moral conviction? Sakura got away with it in no small part because of his irreplaceable talent, and he knew this too. After all, hadn’t it been true from the beginning that we needed him more than he needed us?

My head spun with a pang of claustrophobia, despite the glittering expanse of the ocean stretching onward forever before my eyes. Caught in the middle again. It was getting harder to make out the blurry lines between lover, friend, and bandmate when it came to Sakura. Then again, weren’t these just empty words that I turned over in my mind whenever his visage floated into my imagination? My mysterious man with fierce eyes and that dangerous smile, calloused hands and a warm beating heart. What should I call this feeling of electricity coursing down my spine to the very tips of my fingers and toes?

I bit my lip. It was easy to make it about me, but what  _ was _ going on with Sakura? I could see him shaking his head, his thick hair flying, pinching his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. I could hear the rapid staccato of his voice: “I was about to crawl out of my skin, Hyde. Just couldn’t handle it anymore. I had to go. Where? It didn’t matter. I just had to go.” 

And how would I reply?

Exhibit A: “Don’t be an asshole. You, me, Tetsu, Ken—we’re all in this together. Don’t you fucking let us down like that.”

Exhibit B: “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a pinball machine. I wish I could dissociate from that person, the one on the magazine cover, the one whose voice I hear on the radio in the taxi. I can’t even look in the mirror when I brush my teeth anymore.”

Exhibit C: No words at all. Just wrapping my arms around his chest, covering his eyes with my hands, tugging him back into the swirl of crisp cotton sheets. Forget it all with me.

How long could I go on like this, wanting it all? How long could we go on like this, wearing masks upon masks? I exhaled, hard, and the smoke was carried away by the cool salt-laced breeze in an instant.

“Hyde? You okay there?” Ken asked.

“Ah, yeah... I’m fine,” I muttered. A couple of feeble half-explanations flowed forward in my mind only to recede, mirroring the impartial rhythm of the surf.


	7. heavenly

_Sakura_

The day had arrived. Or more precisely, I watched the sickly green glow of the dressing room clock flicker from 23:59 to 00:00 as I rifled through my brushes, testing their springiness, balancing the handles in my hands, feet tapping, fingers trembling out of excitement. Or was it exhaustion? Fuck it. Not like this of all things was going to make a real difference, at the eleventh hour before the biggest performance of our lives. I shoved the brushes back into their kit and half-skipped my way back to the stage.

Even though we’d been rehearsing here for the past day and a half, the sight of those tiered seats from the _fucking Budokan stage_ sent a fresh shiver down my spine. Even with all the lights turned out save for a lone yellow floodlight, glancing off of the plating on my— _my!_ —drums. I sat myself down and whirled into action, my arms relaxing into practiced muscle memory, each of the familiar voices I coaxed out from the set-up before me feeling like an extension of my own body, ricocheting out into that new, cavernous, pitch-dark chasm.

Time seemed to slow down and speed up as I played and paused, an endless ebb and flow, adjusting the snare to the left, a ride cymbal to the right, crash up, hats down, tightening screws as my grip on the sticks seemed to get looser and looser, a hazy golden film descending down before my eyes, better better better better. One more time, just one more time. Chasing after infinity like a comet pitched out of its orbit.

Einstein used to nap with a pencil in his hand so he’d wake up as soon as he’d drifted off enough to drop it from his fingers. At least, that’s what my physics teacher told me when I kept on nodding off in his class, sleep-deprived from late weekday nights spent lugging gear around in whiskey-soaked live houses, raring to pick up every gig that somebody older and wiser dropped, daydreaming of being on this very stage, squinting against the lights brighter than the sun as I poured my blood, sweat and tears into transmuting space and time with two slender boughs of hickory and my own hands—

I jerked awake with a start as the drumstick flew out of my limp grasp and clattered to the floor. Ah… when had I even stopped playing? Luckily, there wasn’t a soul around to see me in this state. I raked my fingers through my hair, tied back in stubborn messy tangles. Maybe it was time to go home, wash up a little.

A couple of hours later, my hair was still damp from the shower as I pulled on whatever street clothes my hands landed on in the dresser (one perk of a monochromatic wardrobe), hastily brushed my teeth, and zipped out the door again in the half-light of the dawn. I’d sleep tonight, there was still so much to check...

I drifted through the morning’s rehearsal like I was immersed in a bath of lukewarm water, a little numb, a little shivery. Nothing that a bit of coffee, maybe a bit of something stronger, couldn’t fix for the afternoon.

Half an hour until showtime, and Hyde was leaning over my back, brow scrunched up adorably in concentration, his fingers warm on my bare skin, as he carefully inked flowers and vines in the places I couldn’t reach myself. In the silence I closed my eyes for a few moments, leaning back fractionally into his ministrations while I turned over the setlist in my mind for the millionth time.

“How’s that?” My eyes flew open again. He gently pushed on my arm, spinning me around so I could see his handiwork in the mirror.

“Perfect.” I nodded, pulling him down to land a chaste kiss on his lips. “Thank you. You should get ready too.”

He grinned impishly, straightening up and brushing a strand of his dark red bob out of his eyes. “I’ve been ready.” He shrugged on his coat and walked down the hallway towards the stage door.

The concert felt like a hurricane whirling around me as I sat in its eye. Each song seemed to stretch on forever, but at the same time, the night seemed to pass by in an instant. From my perch high in the air for the encore, endless faces stretched on before me. Then, glancing over my shoulder as I played a roll on the timpani, more faces smiled from behind me—I had a sudden sensation of being suspended at the halfway point between heaven and earth, the threshold between life and death. An overwhelming sensation of emptiness, almost comforting in its absolution. Wouldn’t it be good, I thought, somehow gloomy and ecstatic at the same time, if this was the last scene in the film of my life before the director up on high would scream CUT, if oblivion was all I would know after this point...

Next thing I knew, there was a flute of champagne in my hand, friendly clapping fueled by alcohol and a heavy sense of relief all around me. Our label president was making a toast, Tetsu was standing at rapt attention, Ken was laughing with one of his techs, and Hyde—I started a bit, looking down to see him staring right back at me, a small crease of worry on his forehead.

“Cheers,” I intoned abruptly, tapping his glass with my own. Nodded at the crew surrounding us. Downed the champagne in one gulp.

It was over. I felt light-headed. Someone nearby pulled me into a meaningless conversation. Someone handed me another drink, and then another. I laughed and laughed, a high-pitched yowl, not sounding quite like myself. I slinked off to the washroom, fished around in my jacket, not knowing how long I stood there, propped up against the stall door with my eyes rolled back into my head, before I eventually blinked myself back to the surface. I washed my hands in slow motion, splashed some water on my face, stared at myself in the mirror, ran my finger idly along the sharp ridge of my cheekbone. Had it always been like that?

“Sakura.”

A vague buzzing sound, like flies large and small congregating around a carcass. And a familiar, soft, sweet voice.

“Sakura.”

The darkness was so warm, like a leaden blanket, spangled with a million blinking silvery stars...

“Yacchan.”

The voice was right by my ear. An elbow nudged my ribs.

“Let’s go… let’s get you out of here.”

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. We were sitting at a table in the corner. The people before me looked familiar, but everything was a little blurry, a little misty.

A small but firm arm wrapped around my waist. “Come on. Ugh, you’re so heavy. Come on, you’re a grown man already, stand up, let’s go…”

A dim sense of embarrassment filtered into my brain through the fog. “Sorry. I’m fine. Oof. Sorry.” I stumbled and leaned a bit too hard on Hyde’s shoulder. “Sorry…”

He shook his head. Somehow got me into the backseat of a cab. Somehow got me up the elevator and into his apartment.

I opened my eyes to see Hyde’s face hovering close to mine in the dim yellow light of the bedside lamp. I smiled. Reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear.

“You were so good, tonight.”

He bit his lip and smiled at the same time. “Please. Here, drink some.”

I took a gulp of something slightly sweet and comfortingly warm and stared at him hazily. “You… really look like Winona Ryder, you know.”

He choked on his laugh and slapped my shoulder, though it didn’t hurt a single bit. “Shut up. You are so ridiculous.”

I drifted into a dreamless sleep.

I woke to sunlight streaming through the blue curtains. Hyde was still asleep. I rubbed my throbbing forehead and lurched off of the bed into the shower.

I scrubbed at the drawings on my body with my fingernails, watching the flowers melt into the steaming hot torrent of water, the dark ink bleeding out into red, yellow, green strands, a million colors, rushing down the drain, until my torso was only a white canvas again, crisscrossed by faint pink tracks.

I crept back beneath the covers to nose at his neck. “Good morning…”

I let him hold me for some indeterminate stretch of time. Then my hands tangled up in his hair, our limbs tangled up in knots, and for the second time in less than a day, I only saw stars.


	8. don't cry

_ Hyde _

I pretty much had it down to a routine by now.

First, dial Sakura’s place from my place.

No answer. Not surprising.

_ Hey. It’s Sakura. I probably won’t listen to your message but you can try. Later. _

Next, dial Sakura’s manager.

“Sorry, Hyde-san, I haven’t heard from him today… ah, I talked to him yesterday. You have rehearsal tomorrow, right? Yeah, he knows… he should be there tomorrow, I’ll leave him a message reminding him… sorry, okay, see you soon…”

Then, hop into my car and sit in rush hour traffic glaring at the setting sun for an hour, practically losing my mind and cursing myself for not leaving earlier.

After a good long while of circling around the block, find a parking spot within reasonable walking distance to Sakura’s place.

Then, saunter into the konbini on the corner, jam some coins into the pay phone near the front, and punch Sakura’s number into the keypad with well-practiced muscle memory.

_ Hey. It’s Sakura. I probably won’t listen to y— _

Slam the phone back down onto the receiver. Asshole.

Then, wander into the shop and distractedly grab a haphazard assortment of onigiri, fried chicken, and desserts. Pay and smile and nod and smile again at the nice cashier who always looks like she’s seen a spirit descend from the heavens when she sees me. Cute.

Then, loiter outside Sakura’s building looking as inconspicuous and unimposing as possible. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for blessing me with this charming face and decidedly non-threatening height. Eventually slip into the front door when a lady and a young boy come out to walk their dog and the boy holds the door open. Smile and nod and smile again.

Whistle tunelessly in the elevator as it zips up to Sakura’s floor.

Knock on his door.

Keep knocking.

Knock on that stupid door to that stupid apartment until my knuckles are complaining and I have to switch hands.

“Sakura! Open the door!”

No answer. Not surprising.

Eventually, get worked up enough that I end up leaning my whole body against the door, bracing my weight against my elbow and banging with the entire side of my fist.

“Sakura! Open the door you bastard, I know you’re in there, I’m gonna bre—”

Suddenly, the door swung open. Caught off guard, I stumbled forward and landed in a pair of warm, wiry arms. Now this was… more unexpected.

“What’s that now?  _ You _ —” Sakura’s black eyes brushed over me with a glitter of amusement “–are gonna break down my  _ door _ ? I’d really like to see that—”

I lunged my face upwards to capture his lips with my own.

“Mm—mmpf! What the fuck!” But he was smiling; suddenly his starkly thin face was crinkling up into an expression that was almost startling in its unaccustomed insouciance.

I disentangled myself from his embrace and straightened up. With as much dignity as I could muster, I pushed back my hair—somehow just the right length to fall into my eyes—and met his gaze.

“Took you long enough.” I tried to keep my voice as steady as possible. I hoped my face didn’t betray too much, but my heart was pounding away from equal parts excitement and apprehension.

“Yeah, I was… sleeping. Didn’t hear you.”

“Uh-huh.” You didn’t hear me screaming and banging away for fifteen straight minutes? Didn’t hear the phone ringing off the hook all day long? I thought. But I didn’t say a thing and only lifted up the bag containing the konbini loot. “Wanna eat? Don’t get your hopes up, I just stopped by Lawson’s, but I figured…”

“Yeah. I’m starving.” Sakura swung the door open wider and turned on his heel to lead me into his place. “Don’t mind the mess.”

I made a noncommittal sound in my throat and tried to look around without  _ looking like _ I was trying to look around. It had been a while since I had been to Sakura’s place, since we’d just returned to Tokyo after two months of yet more touring. I was almost dreading what I might find here, but it looked more or less the same as usual. Records and CDs scattered on the coffee table. Drumsticks and sheet music covered in scribbles littering the couch. Abandoned mugs of instant coffee perched precariously on windowsills and shelves.

It wasn’t as nearly bad as I thought it would be—everything seemed pretty normal, honestly. Then I shuddered slightly, reprimanding myself silently for expecting the worst—did I think there would be used needles and pills everywhere, half-finished open bottles littering the floor, like something out of a movie or one of our own overproduced promotional videos? Stupid, melodramatic brain.

I babbled for a bit about some movies I’d watched recently as we dug in. Then, the record on the other side of the kitchen table caught my eye.

“‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence’? There are still six months until Christmas…”

Sakura shot me a withering glare as he bit into a chicken wing. “Good music is good music any time of the year.”

“Wouldn’t have thought you’re secretly the type to be sentimental about Christmas, Yacchan,” I teased.

“Speak for yourself, David Sylvian fanboy. Anyway, you’re the one who’s writing Christmas songs in the middle of the summer, that’s the only reason why I’m listening to this.”

“Oh yeah.” I widened my eyes dramatically. “You’re doing research! For our song! Wow, it’s an honor—”

Sakura rolled his eyes and cut me off. “Trying to come up with something that doesn’t make me wanna saw my arms off when I play it.”

“Take it up with Tecchan, I’m only responsible for the words…”

Sakura grunted. “I don’t think it was a Christmas song before you got to it.”

“Is it even a Christmas song?” I frowned and tried to backtrack. “It’s a song about winter! You’re the one making it about Christmas, I said no such thing.”

“Christmas sells.” His bottomless dark eyes bored into my own.

I opened my mouth and then closed it again.

Geez, Sakura, what did Christmas ever do to you?

Finally, he dropped his gaze and broke the silence. “Forget it. I know you like winter.” The shadow of a smile flitted across his gaunt features.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Remember that winter when all of us went to the onsen together? It was so cold outside, my hair froze as soon as we left.”

Sakura’s smile was wider this time. “The good old Osaka days, how could I forget. I still have those pictures lying around somewhere.”

So much has changed since then, I thought. But it seemed too heavy, too pointless to say out loud.

Instead, I groaned and pouted. “Now I step outside my apartment for a second and it feels like an onsen. So go easy on me, okay? I need to write winter songs to escape from this reality.”

He nodded, his expression unreadable. “I understand.”

I stared out the window and imagined going with Sakura to the Christmas market. Sipping hot chocolate and walking through the throng of tourists with Sakura. Gazing up at the gaudy lights with Sakura, telling him just how precious he was to me. Then, I remembered that all the promotional activities for the new album were scheduled for December, and then the next tour would start up again right around Christmastime, so there was no way anything like that could happen this year. Maybe next year. Maybe the year after that.

Sakura got up to put “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” on the record player. We sat and listened, both of us lost in our own thoughts.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said abruptly.

I stared at the clock. “It’s not even eight yet.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I need to catch up on sleep. Reset my schedule. Gotta be all there at rehearsal tomorrow.” A rakish grin.

I rolled my eyes and sighed as I stood up. I looked down at Sakura. The planes of his face could cut glass. His eye sockets looked like they’d been hollowed out. Dark shadows lingered like permanent bruises under his lashes. So beautiful, I thought. Still so beautiful.

He stood up too. Looked down at me from half a head above. Closed the distance between us in a single step. “What. Are you getting ready to leave or something…” His hand slid onto the small of my back.

I shook my head and smiled, wrapping a hand around the nape of his neck. “Don’t be silly. I’m not going anywhere.” I leaned up to meet his lips again.


	9. illusion

_ Sakura _

It was that liminal hour between darkness and daylight when my eyes abruptly flew open.

I stared blankly at the faintly pebbled ceiling of the hotel room as it went from muddy grey to cornflower blue to pale, pale gold in the changing light.

I knew sleep wasn’t coming back to me, yet I kept lying there. What city were we in again? The crisp white sheets were perfectly anonymous, as were the beige curtains and the dark veneered furniture. Then again, did it even matter? We’d already played our show last night, the same show as ever, to the same audience as ever. All the faces in the crowds blurred together into a single beatifically smiling face stamped onto thousands and thousands of bodies—regression towards the mean.

All of it was so fake.

And to tell the truth, I had convinced myself that it didn’t even matter what we did, it didn’t even matter if I played too fast or too slow, if I missed cues or nailed every fill. No one seemed to notice, as long as they saw the four tiny figures on the distant stage onto which they could project the faces from that magazine cover, as long as they heard the songs they knew from the radio station, the TV commercials; no one seemed to care. (So why should I? A small voice in the back of my head sneered and laughed softly.)

No one seemed to care. Unless I counted Tetsu’s mouth twisting into a frown and Ken’s knowing sigh and Hyde’s momentary backwards glance, concern rippling over his brow for a second before he turned back to face the crowd.

And what was I willing to gamble away as these three people looked on? As they watched me with concern written all over their faces as I staggered into rehearsal an hour late? As they wrapped their arms around my shaking arms as we walked off the stage, night after night?

I was willing to gamble away not only my own life, but theirs as well.

I burrowed deeper into the covers, pulling the sheet over my face as the sunrise blushed gently onto the wall. Despicable. Would I be more of a coward for leaving, or for staying? Shameless. Was the choice even mine to make? Selfish. Not knowing the answer to these questions, was that all that kept me hanging in the torture of this limbo? Unforgivable.

The sunlight filtered through the sheet, filling my closed eyes with the brilliant crimson of blood. How pointless, I thought. Even the darkness slips away from me in the end.

So I opened my eyes and turned my head towards the other side of the bed, coming face to face with Hyde’s sleeping visage.

I lay there and watched him for a few beats. Not for too long, not like a total fucking creep, mind you. Just long enough to take in his narrow chest slowly rising and falling for a few languid breaths. His pupils moving every once in a while beneath the delicate skin of his eyelids. What was he dreaming about? Was there a better version of me in his dreams?

In the beginning, my own infatuation with Hyde was probably not entirely different from the infatuation of the fans. One look at those liquid eyes that held a universe within them, one earful of that indescribable voice that wrenched my soul out of my body, and I was a goner. I wanted to get close to him. I wanted him to look at me, to sing to me, to shine onto me. That was enough.

But then deep in the forest, the path split. Our public selves continued to walk on a well-groomed, sunlit trail, while our real selves hacked through the undergrowth with machetes and scratched our heads at the compass spinning madly.

And on some days, I began to doubt if there was anyone else walking through this dense wood with me. I’d turn around and only see the other three through the trees, strolling along that straight, smooth track. What the hell! Why did you leave me here all by myself, leave me to fend off demons and devils with my bare hands, leave me to find my way in the dark and the cold without so much as a lantern to light the way?

So I hung onto Hyde, sunk my claws into him and dragged him back into the deep of the forest with me. Everyone else might only see that other version of him, basking in the warm glow of the spotlight, gazing into the camera with that peerlessly confident pout. But I got to see him in his uncertainty and doubt, his struggles and frustration. I got to see him cry, I got to see him laugh, really laugh, with little crow’s feet around his eyes, without his hand hiding his smile. I got to see him throw back his head and beg me for more; I got to see him gaze at me with adoration, with pity, with fury, with love. He was my talisman, my proof that there was still someone else who was real, someone else that I could hold onto.

But I knew that in the end, Hyde didn’t belong to me. He didn’t belong to that winding path I eked out bit by bit. He belonged to that other path—the one bright with sunlight during the day and spangled with stars at night, the one paved with bricks of gold and good intentions.

He belonged to the world. And he belonged to himself.

And so every day, I tried to let go a little bit more.

It wasn’t like there was nothing to keep me going down this gloomy path of my own. Every night, there were still moments of beauty, of transcendence. Every bit of the talent that I was blown away by five years ago was still there. Perhaps it was even more apparent than it had been in the beginning. Playing the Budokan… there was really nothing like it. All of the songs, all of the firsts we’d been through together… I had a chest full of warm, good memories.

But the burden of everything other than the music had become too heavy. I couldn’t see what lay ahead, but I knew I couldn’t carry it for much longer.

The sun by now was entirely above the horizon. At this point, it always seemed more depressing to stay in bed than to get up and get on with the day.

I sat up, careful not to disturb Hyde’s sleep. He looked so peaceful. Relaxed. Happy.

I walked to the door. Slowly, I opened it and stepped out into the corridor.

And without making a sound, I pulled the door shut behind me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank u to anyone who's been reading this (and esp anyone who's taken the time to leave a comment)!! i appreciate you all! sorry for the sporadic updates. one more chapter to go.


	10. future

_Hyde_

I sat in the corner of the cafe, hat pulled over my head, unable to stop fidgeting with the pencil in my hand. I’d already smoked my way through half a pack of cigarettes in the fifteen minutes I’d been waiting. I’d been on time, truly a novelty—and Sakura was nowhere to be seen, which was honestly unsurprising, but still set off a cascade of worries. Did he not care? Did he change his mind? Did he not want a second chance for…

For what?

I tugged the brim of my hat lower and stole a glance around the room again. Everyone was engrossed in their own business. No tall men in black clothes had appeared. Still, my stomach churned as my coffee sat untouched in front of me, entirely cold by this point.

Even if Sakura didn’t show up today, I told myself, my heart was already prepared. Nothing could be worse than the moment when we’d gotten the news—that Sakura had been caught, that he’d been arrested. My beautiful castle of sand had come crumbling down. Everything was over.

A visceral sense memory of nausea, a feeling of being pitched into an abyss headfirst, suddenly assailed me. I gripped the table reflexively, knuckles turning white, before I willed myself to calm down—it was all in the past now, after all. But no matter how much I wanted to, I was sure that I’d never forget that moment, not for as long as I lived.

Of the days, weeks, months that followed, though, those unmoored times without Sakura to anchor me down—my memories were more muddled.

I knew that in a numb flurry, we had packed up our suitcases and left the country. Forget turning over a new leaf—more like burning down the whole damn library. It was as if we were trying desperately to find a place where everything was an unsettling novelty, so that it was harder to fixate on our misery, so we didn’t have to see with our own eyes our records being pulled from the shelves. Oh, and so that we could avoid the relentless paparazzi, the nonstop rumormongering, the tabloids, the hysterical fans… 

I remembered spending sleepless nights staring up at empty ceilings. Playing a guitar by a rushing river. Wandering through unfamiliar streets, sometimes with Tetsu and Ken, sometimes with our staff, sometimes by myself. Wondering if this was the feeling Sakura ultimately longed for—blissful anonymity, stares of only innocent curiosity, looking over my shoulder only to read the signs.

Again, we looked for a new drummer. Again, we found someone who gave us an ineffable feeling of completeness, the conviction of having found our person—but it was a different sort of completeness and a different person altogether. The floating colors and reckless spontaneity of the band we’d been were now bygone things, receding further and further away with each passing day, memorialized in a considerable but finite length of tape. Never to return.

 _Sakura, I miss you._ My table was constantly covered in letters written in shaky handwriting. _Sakura, I think of you every minute._ Just like the scraps of papers I’d scribble down ideas for lyrics in the early days, they all suffered the same fate—crumpled up and tossed in the trash. _Sakura… no words seem to suffice._

The only things I ended up having the courage to mail were entirely mundane. Sakura, I went to the park today. Sakura, I went to the studio today. Sakura, I went to karaoke today. Sakura, I went for a drive today. _You would’ve liked it. Wish you could’ve been with me._

In time, we came back to Japan. We had our big comeback concert. Then there were new songs, new tours, new albums, a constant whiplash-inducing stream of newness. Life continued on with a vengeance, and we attacked it with a kind of angry hunger. It felt like we were on an unstoppable bullet train, or at least one without emergency brakes.

Meanwhile, my letters to Sakura became phone calls. And then phone calls became… 

Whatever this was about to become today.

A second chance… for something.

I didn’t know why the universe was giving us a second chance. I couldn’t know, yet. But I vowed that whatever it was, it would be better this time around. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be so hopelessly entangled with every other part of our lives. We wouldn’t have to hide from everyone around us. We would be able to draw our own boundaries, do everything on our own terms, this time around… 

_Sakura, only if you’re still willing, only if you’re not sick and tired of me yet, if if if…_

I almost automatically drew out another cigarette before stopping myself—I should pace myself for when Sakura would come. If Sakura would come…? I shoved this thought to the back of my mind and took a gulp of the coffee instead. It was bitter down my throat, bitterness that brought me back to the present, brought me back to the gentle, low chatter of strangers all around me and the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows and—

The silhouette of a wiry man clad head to toe in black appeared in the doorway. As he stepped out of the sun’s glare, I felt my breath hitch. His inky hair spilled onto his shoulders. He turned to survey the room with the assured grace of a lion, his back straight, his stride sure. His eyes glinted like obsidian as they met my own.

As if time itself had stopped for a moment, I stood up and walked towards the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the end! there have been lots of little l'arc easter egg references to songs and random interview anecdotes throughout, so if you've noticed anything, you probably didn't imagine it. thank you for reading!! do leave a comment if you're so inclined!


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